At 10:30 on the morning of October 3, 2023, six Cruise employees joined a video call with six officials from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. A Cruise engineer shared his screen from home and played a 45-second clip that one of the company’s driverless cars had recorded the night before.
His connection was bad. The video kept freezing or going black. Once, two people in the meeting later recalled, he paused it just after the impact, started answering questions, and never pressed play again.
At the end, two of the regulators thanked Cruise: “Thank you for reaching out so quickly. Video worth 1000 words.” Afterward a Cruise lawyer messaged a colleague that the video had cut out “before the vehicle started moving again.”
The night before, at about 9:29, a human driver in a Nissan hit a woman in a crosswalk at Fifth and Market in San Francisco and threw her in front of a Cruise car driving itself with no one inside. The Cruise car braked hard, hit her, and stopped. Then the software, which had read the crash as a side impact, told the car to pull out of traffic. It did not detect her underneath. It dragged her about 20 feet, at up to 7.7 mph, and halted only because a wheel spinning on her leg set off a sensor fault. The Nissan driver fled. Firefighters needed heavy rescue tools to free her.
Cruise knew. At 3:45 a.m. an engineer told a Slack channel of 77 employees that the car had moved one or two car lengths after the impact. In a prep session before the NHTSA call, the notes record a company lawyer calling the dragging the “Biggest issue candidly.”
The plan was to play the full video, let it “speak for itself,” and answer whatever it raised. With NHTSA, the state DMV and the mayor’s office, the questions never came, likely because bad connections kept officials from seeing the video clearly, the investigators found. At the DMV, Cruise attendees later recalled, some officials sat with their heads in their hands, in shock. No one from Cruise said plainly that the car had dragged her.
Cruise staff told investigators they had meant to disclose it, and the full video reached NHTSA that afternoon. Quinn Emanuel, the law firm the Cruise and GM boards hired, interviewed Cruise staff but not the regulators, and found no evidence that anyone set out to mislead. It did find leadership “fixated” on rebutting early reports that blamed the robotaxi rather than the Nissan. At 6:45 that morning, chief executive Kyle Vogt and his communications chief had discussed showing reporters the full video or revising their statement, and chose neither. The firm saw too much of an “us versus them” attitude toward regulators. “There was no captain of the ship.”
On October 24, California’s DMV suspended Cruise’s driverless permit, saying it had learned of the car’s second movement from another government agency. Vogt left in November. Penalties followed: $112,500 to California’s utilities commission, $1.5 million to NHTSA, and a $500,000 criminal fine after Cruise admitted filing a false crash report with NHTSA that left out the dragging.
In December 2024, having spent more than $10 billion on Cruise, General Motors said it would stop funding robotaxi development. Its press release cited the time and money needed to scale and an increasingly competitive market. It did not mention October 2.